I mean sure, banks are the antithesis of what we're trying to achieve, but that doesn't automatically/magically makes them dissappear, we need people to be able to take their funds away from banks and make it easy as most people don't care to learn the intricacies of how the tech world is run. With that said, I think EqiBank is precisely that, a mean to this goal, we can't just impose a different economic system without laying the proper foundations for transitioning away from the banking system.

Or that's at least the way I see it.

It's kind of a clickbaity term, but the sentiment behind it is to spark that feeling, for example when BTC first passed the $1k mark. Or when it hit $5k. $10k, and so on. It personally felt great, and it hints to that feeling, we all know it and we'd all like to see it happen again, mass adoption IS the way to go for people to realize how truly better can crypto become considering it's transparent.

So yes, crypto would be massively benefited from being able to be used in a similar fashion to regular cash, where you can just swipe to buy at most any place.

But that's my opinion!

Human nature plays a huge role into it, and pride, in fact so much so, most people don't want to realize they base their beliefs in false stuff. Imagine that god turned out existing. People would still deny his existence, we see it all the time specially in today's social climate with social media and stuff, look at how many anti vaxxers have appeared! And this is people that is being manipulated. Some of these religious folks say they wouldn't change their views but it's just because science doesn't cater to their interests.

So it is a difficult thing to deal with. But not impossible.

There's no blanket explanation for this, is this suicide rate rising locally or globally? Did you mean a specific country? Suicide rates are going up on my home country (Venezuela) for obvious reasons, it's sad to think about it in the sense that, ever since I was young, family/friends always referred to home as the "land of happiness", and to see statistics such as these rise just break my heart.

You can see here suicide rates globally: http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/suicide-rate-by-country/, would be cool to be able to see the change over the years, as this site only shows 2018.

I went through it and though I don't understand the specifics of how you did it, I am amazed at your findings! Thanks for sharing this!

The problem is that bitcoin holds aspects of the three, trying to categorize it on either would be focusing on different aspects that bitcoin as a whole holds, it has to be looked in a "bigger picture" kind of way, instead of trying to make it fit on these caregories. Remember that the concept of Security, Currency and Commodity as the "only" assets is a pretty old concept, bitcoin is not even 10 years old now! Maybe a new definition is in order

While this is true, I'd like to expand a little bit on it. It's easy to track when big chunks are moved as a whole, someone that splits it up and buys goods with bitcoin directly would be more difficult to track, though not impossible. Because of this its a bit difficult to prove that the person cashing out is the same person that requested the ransoms, of course it depends from case to case.


Now you do mention something important, but all things considered, would cash then be approved if it weren't already a commonly accepted mean of transaction? Bitcoin at least leaves trails that can be followed all the way to the start. Cash can change ownership sooo much easily, I just don't see how it isn't a counter argument against official currency alternatives, that's all.

I think it falls a little bit of in a grey area here. Social media the way it started had SO MUCH potential, but then it had to be made addictive (and guess whose decision that was, hint, not exactly the user's). And on top of that add how our lazy nature made it sooo easy for fake news to spread and exacerbated the problem in ways that we just didn't expect.

Now to answer with my opinion here, I do think that social media has great potential, thing is that as everyone is given "a voice", some people just haven't earned it. Just see how easy it is to spread fake stuff around. I wish there was a way for people to learn how to not fall prey to these tactics and then Social Media would be a different place, but alas no one is taught how to properly "go online".

So yeah, while it is kind of cancer, it is a preventable one.

While FIAT has been going strong for quite a while, you gotta remember that FIAT didn't exist before, and its mass adoption was due to how simpler FIAT made things. With advances in ourselves as societies and as new technologies are being developed, I believe that yes, eventually, something better/faster/easier than FIAT can and will replace it. Is it crypto though? I wish. That'd mean we get to tell everyone "I told you so!".

Jokes aside, and building on that "something better/faster/easier" that I mentioned earlier, I wanted to share a piece of info that you guys might find interesting, this just an excerpt:

"A federal science agency in Australia has claimed a world first after completing testing on a global blockchain network that is capable of processing 30,000 cross-border transactions per second.

If the test can be successfully carried into a working model, it could help the banking industry attain the scale needed to put blockchain networks into the mainstream.

The network, called  Red Belly Blockchain, was developed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the University of Sydney, and deployed over the Amazon Web Services (AWS) global cloud infrastructure. It was tested across 1,000 nodes in 14 countries at a benchmark rate of 30,000 transactions per second and with an average latency of three seconds.

According to the developers, the network hopes to solve the scalability issue by using an alternative consensus algorithm instead of the proof-of-work mechanism adopted by most public networks, including bitcoin."

Now I feel that news like this are gigantic for the crypto world because if there's something crypto kinda fails at is at scaling, there's issues with scale, now, to completely phase FIAT away I think crypto should first take care of its own inner workings and make sure it has the capacity to run the world's worth of transactions in the blockchain, and then, FIAT will disappear out of lack of use. At least that's what I think.

Link to the article I mentioned above, here: https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/32700/australian-agency-claims-blockchain-breakthrough

Ho-lee mo-lee! Though it's limited to having to order a physical card (since virtual cards were eliminated), this is a huge step in the right direction. IBAN on a crypto/tradicional currency payment company just goes to show that the team behind Wirex has the head in the game, wish they could send the cards to more places, last I saw is they're expanding to Canada and Australia so yay for them!

You're missing the point, a private entity should not be allowed free reign to print money. You said it yourself, that's what the federal reserve is there for. Otherwise there's exponential profits that end up being pocketed by these private institutions, and at large scale, could cause a crash in the economy.

And that's the thing, as you describe it is also the perfect way for it to happen, federal reserve makes physical money. If you watch the documentary it focuses more on Europe and also on the digital side of things. I think that the ability for private banks to make loans with money they don't have should NOT happen.

Sorry for the confusing title. To kick it off I'll start with the frase at the beginning of a video I'll link below: "Never before has there been as much money as there is today, yet central banks continue to pump money into the economy...", I saw this video recently which goes into detail how banks are just poofing money out of nowhere with little to no repercussions, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6m49vNjEGs

So I wanted to discuss, realistically, how can crypto solve this? If you didn't want to watch the video there's this very simple analogy of how the majority of people think banks work:

Investor deposits large amounts of money, entrepeneurs come and ask for a loan which is taken from these investors pools, right? Well, not quite. Private banks in some jurisdictions are allowed to loan upwards 99% money they themselves don't have, and still be picky about it (they're not going to invest in risky projects, loans are given of course to safer projects, short term profit if you will).

So there you have it, I know of course that the blockchain is transparent, everyone can see where the money goes, can transactions being out in the open help deal with these shady practices?

Which takes us to my next point, as proven last year, crypto currencies don't seem to handle well with a large influx of transaction, so would the answer for crypto to be an actual currency be as simple as "be able to do more transactions"? And I don't mean exactly double them, how many financial transactions happen per second? They're quite a lot. Can it really be hosted in the blockchain?

Si de hecho, varios traders de bajo volumen mantienen sus activos (assets en español?) en el mismo exchange y suelen ignorar el riesgo en el que se ponen a si mismos al no tener control de sus private keys. Como me gustaría ver más exchanges implementar como dices el uso de hot y cold wallets, aunque aún hay riesgo, es menor. Hace unos días hablaba con un CM de una altcoin, conversábamos sobre el estado actual del mercado (específicamente de los intercambios) y como parece que estamos distraídos como comunidad, entre exchanges cobrando demasiado dinero para listar nuevas monedas, se puede decir que va en contra de los ideales que hicieron popular al crypto para empezar.

I feel you're missing the fact that Ethereum has been the top altcoin for quite a while now, so it's not "highly not possible", it's been status quo basically. There's currently over saturation of altcoins, they're becoming way too specific and way too niche. Not to say that it's necessarily a bad thing. I'd like to see the likes of XMR / Dash come up above Ethereum as the dominant altcoin but at this point it's pure speculation to say it will absolutely happen.

I think it depends on the volumes they're dealing with, I'd say low volume traders don't necessarily worry much at all about having their assets on a exchange. Would you personally hold high volumes of crypto on random exchanges? I think not, and being compliant with the law means that there's going to be fail-safe mechanisms in place that will ensure that your assets keep being yours. And as a crypto enthusiast, I'm really looking forward to the launch of this platform.

I'm sorry but, where are you getting that 80% figure? I'd love to see a source on that. I do agree that adoption is increasing and it is true that criminals or otherwise can use crypto alike, but I feel it's unfair to the ecosystem to lie in that 80% of earning is done with the help of bitcoin. Crypto markets volume daily is only 0.0024% of what FOREX moves daily, figures taken from:

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/volume/24-hour/ (added up the top 10 here)

https://www.fxcm.com/insights/bitcoin-vs-forex-understanding-differences/ (divided it by the value shown here of 5 trillion turnover)

So while crypto as a market is thriving, it's yet to make a serious dent on global economy, more adoption would be AWESOME as it would expose more investors to this market. Adoption can happen either because of government's adoption or otherwise, but please let's try to keep the info we share, true. Or specify that your personal earnings are 80% being made on crypto, that wouldn't be bad at all!

As per the T&C, Airdrop ends in December, distribution itself hasn't been discussed yet, should be announced later on.

While I agree with the OP when he says bitcoin will not be outdated by another currency, I don't agree with his analogy. It has more to do with what the user I'm quoting referred to, bitcoin is simple and that's what makes it more attractive. Also the fact that it is more established as THE original crypto, it gives value to newcomers I guess.

Thing is that some people act on feelings rather than reason. You have to consider other people's POV. I used to work in the bitcoin ATM industry as the support guy for the machines, this was during last year's bull run. I'd sometimes get calls from people telling me "bitcoin is going up like crazy! I want to earn easy money!" and that was the premise how many people joined during it. The will to take risk was there, whether they couldn't was something I am not the judge of, but I kinda understand it, some people didn't know much about crypto at all but still wanted to buy in to get some of that cake everyone seemed to be having.

The true advice here is do not risk more than you're willing to lose, and think very good what this amount is and stick to it.